From Here to Eternity: I’ve Been Had

⁷O Lord, you have enticed me,
and I was enticed;
you have overpowered me,
and you have prevailed.
⁹If I say, ‘I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name’,
then within me there is something like a burning fire
shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.

-Jeremiah 20:7,9

Jeremiah has noticed something about his walk with God. The hounds of heaven are fierce and they have prevailed, God has prevailed in his life. Jeremiah has noticed that once caught all he can do is surrender to God’s Way in life. And he has experimented – “I just won’t mention God anymore,” he says to himself. When he does this he notices that when he tries to be quiet about the Reality of God’s being in him, it is like he has shut a burning fire up in his bones. His very bones want to cry out. He is weary, tired and forlorn as he suppresses the sublime in his life. He no longer is content to lie about who he is (a beloved one of God) and who he belongs to (he has his being in God). He is called out of himself to live as God would have it.

Surrendering to the truth of God’s presence in our living and breathing we notice that we have been “had.” As a mother has her child, I have been “had’ and we are "being had" by God. Our whole lives are spent gradually waking to the reality of this: we live move and have our being in God. During Lent we seek to open ourselves to a more direct and intimate experience of the grace of God in life. We will open again to the Eternal that is offered to us in every moment, with every breath. We will mention the implications for this in our lives. And we will notice that even as our lives seem to be a movement from here to eternity, we never left home. In the Eternal Now we discover our true home in God is as close as our next breath. Please join me in church over Lent.

Love, David